"There Is a Right Way"

James Welch’s Riding the Earthboy 40 remains a watershed work in American poetry more than thirty years after its initial publication in 1971. Some would argue it has maintained its prominence because it accomplishes an historically and materially genuine confessional regionalism that Welch’s mentor at the University of Montana, Richard Hugo, professed but never quite achieved. Others would say that Welch’s book remains vital because it initiated a new era in Native American poetry. There were other important works by Native poets prior to Riding the Earthboy 40—significant poems by N. Scott Momaday and Duane Niatum—but none collected into a single book with the intercultural impact of Welch’s compilation.¹

On the jacket of the 2004 Penguin edition, Sherman Alexie calls Riding the Earthboy 40 “one of my true holy bibles.” Joy Harjo cites it as “a touchstone for a generation who were figuring out a poetry that had to be assembled from broken treaties, stolen lands, the blues, horses, fast cars, and long rough nights.” I would like to explore why this collection of lyric poetry, published by a writer who would become much more famous for his novels, remains so influential, both within American Indian literary circles and among a broader group of readers and writers who consider it an essential part of the larger American literary canon.

Riding the Earthboy 40 enjoys this range of effect, I believe, because James Welch turned his early and amazing grasp of the Euramerican lyric to the real-world ethical questions that engaged him as a young American Indian man in 1960s Montana. His collection remains powerful because Welch never gave an inch as either a craftsman or a human being. Through Euramerican lyric practice, he gave formal expression to his feelings in ways that never compromised their anger or their plaintiveness. If traditional lyrical poetry in English was born of the “enemy’s language,” Riding the Earthboy 40 reclaimed it as a viable expressive mode for a generation of Native Americans who were coming of age in those tumultuous years just prior to the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee. A close reading of one of the collection’s most economical and highly crafted lyrics, “There Is a Right Way,” demonstrates the process by which Welch harnessed the lyric form to his own emerging historical consciousness—what he calls his “renegade words”—as a Blackfeet/Gros Ventre man taking stock of his life at the middle of the twentieth century.

Although Welch’s collection as a whole is both stylistically and politically challenging, “There Is a Right Way” is in many ways conventional. It is a lyric that meditates on a specific occasion and whose form models the speaker’s transforming consciousness as he engages in contemplation. Yet Welch’s poem is at once exemplary of the convention and exceeds it, locating his speaker in a windy Montana landscape, where he witnesses a prairie hawk’s pursuit of a field mouse. In subject and occasion, Welch’s lyric finds analogs in works like Robert Frost’s “Design” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” But where Frost’s experience of the predator-prey relationship leads him to muse on the Christian argument of design, “There Is a Right Way” explores the “justice” of the scene and the way that it forces the speaker to abandon conventional ethical or moral considerations. In the end, the reader is also left to ponder rightness and justice from a perspective outside the conventional Euramerican discourses of morality and justice.

Welch’s meditation immediately strikes out in this startling direction by tuning its simple diction to an unexpected discursive field. It is the “justice” of the prairie hawk’s actions that moves the speaker to contemplation. The reader is thus instantly implicated in an ethical situation, even before the poem’s occasion completely reveals itself. The word “justice” also creates suspense. What hangs in the balance? Is the following scene somehow related to the discourse of jurisprudence, that institutional script of the many-centuries-long fight of Indian peoples for sovereignty?

Welch enhances the opening line...